Consumption
by woobloo97
Summary: Elena's life is defined by death.


_**Rebekah:**__ Name me a more human experience than senior prom._

_**Elena:**__ Death._

_"Pictures of You," season 4, episode 19_

**Miranda and Grayson Gilbert**

Her parents are dead. She walks into the bathroom, looks at herself, her tear stained face, mussy hair, tries to bring herself to do something. She opens the cupboard, scans the items, sees the tweezers that her father used that one time she got a splinter when she was five, she kicked and she screamed and she wailed, and yet her father just rubbed her foot with his thumb while getting the splinter out, and her mother held her and sang, fed her M&Ms. She sees her mother's perfume, her father's shaving cream, and before she can stop herself, she's smelling them. Her brain goes dark for a second; she feels pressure behind her eyes and wants to tear them out, stop crying, make herself stop inhaling the scent of her dear parents, her laughing mother, her kind father. Her parents are dead, and that's definite, a fact.

She doesn't think she's strong, but she has to pretend.

* * *

**Vicki Donovan**

She's barely alone at all for the next week or two, always with Jeremy, often with Matt. When she does get a moment alone, crossing the yard to go to school, she trips over the hose, she remembers the time she, Matt and Bonnie played hide and seek with Vicki, and they always made her be the one to find them, the seeker, (the odd man out), and Matt and Bonnie and she would pile all together, behind the woodpile, in the bathtub, giggling, listening to Vicki stomping around, trying to find them, the way that afterwards, they would always run through the sprinkler. Vicki had the same pink bathing suit three years in a row.

She finds her fingernails dug into her hands, make it stop, make it stop.

* * *

**Anna, Richard Lockwood, and other fire victims**

She wraps her arms around Jeremy, sees what can only be Anna's hair clip on his dresser. How much more hurt can he take? She has the horrible, visceral feeling that her diaphragm is working its way up her esophagus, and it nearly knocks the wind out of her. She can only imagine what Jeremy is feeling . She can imagine it, and it almost kills her, so she wraps her arms around him, tightly, squeezing the pain out, wetting his hair with her tears, slyly knocking the clip into the wastebasket with her elbow.

* * *

**Aimee and Sarah**

She goes to the funeral, feels drained, she cries. This isn't fair, but that's hardly original. Every death is unfair to somebody. She thinks of all the times she's gossiped with them, heard of who was dating who, who passed out drunk last night at Tyler Lockwood's party, she thinks of everything they ever talked about; the way Aimee would do the chicken dance if bribed into doing so with redvines, the way Sarah loved dogs. She almost feels wrong in her grief, because it isn't as strong as Sarah's mother, who passes out, or Aimee's brother, who starts yelling in the middle of service at nothing or noone. She looks over at the table, the pictures, sees the yearbook candid with her and Caroline and Aimee, arms around each other smiling, sees the picture of her and Sarah chatting by the locker.

-she almost starts yelling with him-

* * *

**Rose**

She wraps her arms around Damon. She's always comforting somebody. That's good, it makes her feel useful. Oh god, did she really just think that? How selfish can she get? How cold?

People die and people die and all you can do is comfort the living. All Rose wanted to do was live, she thinks, and she squeezes Damon a little harder, not for him, but for herself.

* * *

**Isobel Flemming**

She must be cursed, that must be it.

If only it were that simple- responsibility, association, acquaintance, these are not supernatural concepts. Her birth mother, who she thought was evil, is now dead, and how is she supposed to react? Her birth mother's dead.

She carefully saves a bag of ash, a few buttons from her coat, and she doesn't know where to sprinkle them because she didn't know Isobel, so she sprinkles them next to her family plot, sticks a cross in the ground.

deaddeaddead. What do they say about saying a word over and over? Repetition makes a word sound strange... or is it familiar.

* * *

**Jenna Sommers and John Gilbert**

She screams for real this time, later. She gives herself that, five minutes of yelling, and she nearly blacks out. She then is slightly hoarse, but ready to live again, because that's what to do, live in the face of death, her feeble attempt at courage.

She tries to will herself to stop the flood of memories, because these are people she's known her whole life, and there are too many memories, the letter, Jenna's bedroom, everything screaming that others used to be, there's too much to cry over. So she sets the letter on Jenna's bureau and shuts the door.

* * *

**Andie Star**

Her reaction is more about Stefan, and Damon, than the woman herself, which, when she's laying in her bed, she feels quite bad about, gives herself a minute to feel terrible. She doesn't let herself go there, though, really go into Andie's head, because if she does, she might break, and she can't let herself feel every death- at this point that's suicide. She feels bad for thinking this way, and sheds tears.

-for andie, for herself, for everyone who death affects-

She gets up, stares in the mirror, then brushes her hair determinedly. She doesn't watch the news for months.

* * *

**Bill Forbes**

She wraps her arms around Caroline, and she feels so strongly-

-grief is similar to rage, really, she supposes, except that rage is external-

Caroline doesn't have her daddy anymore, and that's the worst feeling in the world, knowing that life will go on without him. It's also vitalizing, but in the depths of Caroline's grief, that's irrelevant, so she squeezes Caroline all the tighter. When did this happen, when did she become the all knowing guru of death?

-emotions of death-

well, she supposes, if her experience can help someone else, then it will make that person better, and that's good

Caroline's crying.

* * *

**Alaric Saltzman**

Her last parent figure, gone.

Later she gets drunk (on bourbon), not adorable drunk but cynical drunk for once, and she tells people she's truly grown up now. She feels horrible about it later, saying that.

Ric is dead and that's not fair. But she's been over this. Death is never fair to anyone, and yet it's human.

Being human isn't fair.

-life isn't fair-

-share your toys etc.-

-maybe mom was onto something-

-mom's gone though, so that doesn't matter-

* * *

**Elena Gilbert**

She spends an afternoon going through old school pictures. She grieves for purely selfish reasons, she reflects, but still oh so necessary, you lives because Jeremy can't lose any more people; losing is the only thing worse than...

-she can't think of a comparison now, just hold on a minute-

She lives because living is the only way to cope with losing. She questions- does this mean she's lost herself? Everyone else seems to think so.

She rather thinks she's found herself, if only because losing seems to define her.

* * *

**Pastor Young and the Town Council**

she grieves, and that's all she can do for them

These people who've known her since childhood, these people who cared what happened to her and who she's carpooled with and talked with and been to parties with, and she sees the invitation to the last founder's party in a drawer and she puts it on the fridge.

-these people are eating her alive-

-she grieves-

* * *

**Connor Jordan**

She didn't even know him, and yet she killed him. "She"

-that's the important part of the sentence, and she feels terrible about that fact, because that's not what's important to his family his friends-

-those who lost him when he died-

* * *

**Carol Lockwood**

-this is getting ridiculous, thinks her cynical self-

She's dead, and everyone's lost her.

-i've lost her, she thinks, and she remembers the time she and caroline and bonnie went to tyler's after school in second grade and mrs. lockwood taught them how to make peanut butter cookies-

* * *

**Jeremy Gilbert**

Somewhere in the white noise, in the screaming, the rational part of her brain that seems to have become much more separate now that she's a vampire whispers seductively.

-what do you have left-

-if you lose everyone what do you have left-

She has herself, what a cruel joke

-she was just living for Jeremy-

-don't say his name-

-this is ludicrous, her cynical self says, stop it.-


End file.
